Moral Force in the Industrial Field. 149 
best efforts. We need a higher practical morality, a higher 
conception of social duty, and juridical conceptions and defini¬ 
tions more in accord with modern conditions.. “Our ruling 
powers have still an equivocal character; they are not in real 
harmony with industrial life, and are in all respects imper¬ 
fectly imbued with the modern spirit. What is now most 
urgent is not legislative interference on any large scale with 
the industrial relations, but the formation in both the higher 
and lower regions of the industrial world, of profound convic¬ 
tions as to social duties, and some more effective mode than at 
present exists of diffusing, maintaining, and applying those 
convictions. ”* 
Moral force is not, indeed, new in the field of economics. It 
is an old agent. The increasing extent of its field of opera¬ 
tions is new, however. The growing complexity of economic 
relations has been accompanied by an increasing amount of 
moral force in actual operation, but not an amount increasing 
in proportion to the growing needs of the new conditions. 
The growing tendency to seek state intervention is an 
attempt to supply the lack of this moral force. But the 
attempt confuses the sphere of church and state. It implies a 
belief that the faults of human character cannot be eradicated, 
and so must be continuously checked, repressed, crushed, by 
external authority. The trouble with the method is that the 
controlling authority itself has the same faults as have its 
subjects, and that the faults cannot be so held in check. This 
method does not remedy defects of human character; nor does 
it do away with temptations to their activity; it only seeks to 
surround them with legal and conventional barriers. It is 
true, indeed, that change of industrial environment may have 
an elevating effect on morals. Amidst the wrecks of profit- 
sharing and co-operative schemes, for example, there are some 
that testify to the evolution, as a result of the industrial change, 
of higher ethical conceptions among those engaged in them. 
But such means are partial and transitory. A highly moral 
organization is impossible if the elements composing it are not 
themselves moral. As Spencer says, “The belief that faulty 
* Ingram, Ibid. 
